I just read "The House on the Borderlands", which is usually lumped in with horror, but it's not. William Hope Hodgson wrote another book about the sun burning out called "Planet X" or something like that. All of this is pre-world war one.

ModernLuddite:There's a ton of great sci-fi from before there was sci-fi.

I just read "The House on the Borderlands", which is usually lumped in with horror, but it's not. William Hope Hodgson wrote another book about the sun burning out called "Planet X" or something like that. All of this is pre-world war one.

I believe the novel you reference is The Night Land, which is one of the true extraordinary stories in early science fiction. Hodgeson descibes a world where the sun is dying, and humanity is besieged by all sorts of unknown, mysterious entities that were accidentally released upon the inhabitants of (what's left of) the Earth by scientists from a previous age. The prose he used for the novel is however, extremely difficult to get through. It especially becomes tiresome once the protagonist rescues a young girl from another refuge and they attempt to travel back to his home in the Great Redoubt.

The story has taken on a life of its own though. There has been a good deal of fan fiction attempting to elaborate on many of the mysterious subjects Hodgeson introduced in the novel. Also, one fan performed a rewrite where he removed all the unusual wording and prose and replaced it with a more reader-friendly style.A must for any sci-fi enthusiast interested in the roots of the genre.